The problems as I see them are:

Browsers either have DRM or they are bloated with features some don't expect to be there and are no modularity at all. Sometimes you can disable a feature but not remove it.

The alternatives are often not packaged by Debian, so if they don't have it then we'd need to package it ourselves. Firefox and derivatives are sometimes very large.

Things move fast and the alternatives don't provide a long term support cycle afaict. Since they would need to be maintained for a whole release cycle (and LTS) that makes it more awkward to package.

I like the idea of Iceweasel-UXP[1] as a more recent and complete firefox replacement without DRM, especially if trimmed down a little.

[1]: https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:project:iceweasel-uxp

Cheers,

chillfan

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Friday, April 5, 2019 12:23 PM, Hendrik Boom <hendrik@???> wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 05, 2019 at 08:06:14AM +0000, chillfan--- via Dng wrote:
>

> > There are many of us frustrated with web browsers and the web in general,
>

> Is there anything that can be done about this?
>

> Browsers seem to be an all-or-nothing kind of nonmodularity.
>

> Yet they should have components that can be used independently.
>

> I can see
>

> a hugely complicated display mechanism that takes HTML, pdf, and other
> file formats and displays them. (This could easily be several
> mechanisms, of course)
>

> A user-interface system that gives the user some influence in deciding
> which files are to be displayed (and implicitly fetches them using a
> variety of protocols or refuses to do this on the basis of security
> concerns which may conflict with the user's). This is a largely
> nonprogrammable interface.
>

> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>

> A number of these tools would be quite useful if they could easily be
> called independently from any relatively sane and bug-resistant
> high-level language (user's choice).
>

> I'd very much like to be programmatically in charge of the browser.
> I'd like to be able to make it do things not in the immediate vision of
> the large organisation providing it -- without starting over from
> scratch.
>

> -- hendrik
>

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